The Ohio Supreme Court threw out FirstEnergy Solutions’ lawsuit arguing that the recently enacted law bailing out its two nuclear power plants on Lake Erie cannot be subjected to voter referendum.
The Spanish oil giant Repsol SA has unveiled its goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. While a growing number of companies have pledged to reduce greenhouse gases from their operations, none has committed to eliminating them, until now.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) will cease lending for fossil fuel projects in two years, officials announced. The EIB board of directors adopted the plan after heated debate, with some countries objecting to the inclusion of natural gas in the lending ban.
Cities in California and Massachusetts are advancing what has become the newest trend in the local fight against climate change: bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings.
North Carolina has emerged as the epicenter of the region’s fight over wood pellets, a popular substitute for coal in European power plants that critics say is making climate catastrophe worse, not better. Pressure from activists has garnered rhetorical gestures from Governor Roy Cooper against the international biomass trade, but state officials have continued to grant requests from Enviva, the world’s largest pellet maker, to expand production.
The oil industry faces an uncertain future. The world is rapidly waking up to the severity and immediacy of the threat from climate change. At the same time, electric vehicles are getting cheap enough to compete with internal-combustion engines.
What if excess carbon in the atmosphere could be converted to more useful forms? That’s the ultimate goal of carbon conversion companies such as Opus 12, a startup in Berkeley, California. Making stuff out of carbon dioxide could be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030, and it creates an economic incentive to start removing carbon from the atmosphere sooner rather than later, which is a critical piece of most scenarios for limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Questions remain about where the money is coming from to fund both the petition drive for a public vote on FirstEnergy’s subsidies and the inflammatory campaign against it by a group called Ohioans for Energy Security.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg at New York City's Climate Strike in September 2019. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez.)
The policies explored in this series, taken together and adopted at national scale, would allow the United States to do its part in limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Can it be done? The final installment of “Look to the States” concludes with an outlook and some tools — drawing once more from state-level successes — for putting a decarbonization plan into practice.
To support decarbonization efforts, we will have to overhaul our transportation system. Over the course of the past century, we used fossil fuels to revolutionize the way we move from place to place — creating unprecedented mobility, but substantially contributing to climate change. About 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. But we can look to key states for a glimpse of what climate leadership on transit looks like.
